Double consciousness
Du Bois's autoethnographic work, The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, in which he described the African American experience of double consciousness, including his own.
[2] The term also referred to Du Bois's experiences of reconciling his African heritage with an upbringing in a European-dominated society.
Du Bois first used the term in an article titled "Strivings of the Negro People", published in the August 1897 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.
One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.
[5] Paul Gilroy applied theories of culture and race to the study and construction of African American intellectual history.
[7] Gilroy pioneers a shift in contemporary black studies by arguing for a rejection of the notion of a homogeneous nation-state based nationality in favor of analyzing "the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective".
Gilroy used Du Bois's theory of double consciousness to suggest there exists an internal struggle to reconcile being both European and Black, which was his main focus in his book.
[9] Gilroy argues that occupying the space between these two dialectal subjectivities is "viewed as a provocative and even oppositional act of political insubordination".
[8] This means that for black people across diaspora, thinking of the duality in their identity as one is almost paradoxical, and conceptualizing and actualizing this is a move of symbolic resistance in modernity.
[citation needed] Very similarly to Du Bois, Frantz Fanon touched upon the term of double consciousness in his life.
Additional identities that may affect the already present double consciousness experience might include ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
[14] Anna Julia Cooper similarly references the intersectionality of race and gender within her work A Voice from the South where she states: "Only the black woman can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole ... race enters with me".
Many African American women turned towards feminism in their fight against oppression because "there was an awareness that they were being treated as second-class citizens within the Civil Rights movement of the 60's."
[citation needed] The first portion of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, labeled "White Power", by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton, provides evidence backing up the ideology of double consciousness in regards to black people in the United States.
"[20] Therefore, while the Black population in the United States are essentially equal to whites under written law, there remain deeply rooted inequities between the races that reinforce double consciousness.
[21] This means that for Black Germans during the Third Reich, the psychological dilemmas of "two-ness" did not necessarily map onto the double consciousness dynamic W. E. B.
